`emerge sync` repeatedly led to the io.c errors that everyone is complaining about, so I copied a recently sync'd portage tree from another machine, and then did a successful `emerge sync` -- I probably only needed to `emerge metadata`.

I was then informed to update my make.profile, but when I did, I got the infamous `str`... error when I ran `emerge system -pv`. So I linked back to my old profile, emerged portage, ran `etc-update`, and then updated my make.profile. This time it was successful. I'm now running `emerge metadata` (because I'm paranoid) and then I plan to try an `emerge -u world`.

Since I haven't set my flags in make.conf yet, does anyone have any reasonable suggestions? The label on the front reads "SPARC station 10", uname lists as sun4m, and /proc/cpuinfo referenced it as a supersparc.

-mcpu=v8 -O2 -pipe would probably be safe. Depending on whether you have supersparc or hypersparc processors, you could change -mcpu=v8 to -mcpu=supersparc or -mcpu=hypersparc.

About sparc32 being unsupported, currently there are issues with the kernel and possibly other elements in the core system that make it hard to support at this time. Most things will probably work to some degree, but chances are you'll end up running into problems emerging some packages (perl for example).